India is making giant leaps in the renewable energy sector. In 2016-17 financial year, renewable power projects output rose by 26%, which makes India's renewable energy sector as the fastest growing in the world. Indian is expected to be the third biggest solar market from 2018 onwards after China and United States of America.
Being the 5th largest power generation portfolio in the world, India's renewable energy contribution stands at 44.8 GW, which includes 27.4 GW of wind power and 8.06 GW of solar power installed capacity. Under the 'Make in India' campaign, Prime Minister Modi aims to raise the renewable capacity to 175 GW by 2022 from 45 at present. This will include 100GW of solar power and 60GW from Wind power.
National Resource Defense Council estimates that more than 1 million full time equivalent jobs will be created by the Solar Industry alone, by 2022. This includes more than 2 lakh engineering jobs and more than half a million jobs in the skill sector. Wind sector will create 1.9 lakh jobs by 2022. Renewable energy target of the country interlinks with Skill India initiative, which aims to skill 400 million people by 2022.
As of March 2016, the installed capacity of Wind power in India was 26,769MW. India has set ambitious targets to generate 60MW of electricity from Wind power by 2022. Wind energy accounts 61% of renewable installed capacity, thereby making India 4th largest in terms of capacity.
With 9012 MW, Indian government expanded its solar plans targeting $100 billion in investments and 100 GW of solar capacity, including 40 GW directly from rooftop solar. Tamil Nadu has the highest installed solar capacity followed by Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. With large scale solar power deployment, India is set to achieve more than double of that achieved by China and Germany.
In 2016, Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister of France, Francois Hollande laid the foundation stone for the headquarters of International Solar Alliance in Gurgaon. ISA will focus on promoting and developing solar energy and solar products for countries lying between Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn.
RBI has revised the guidelines for all scheduled commercial banks including renewable energy in the categories priority sector. Also the bank loans for solar rooftops system to be treated as a part of home loan.
Transitioning to an energy future that has a significant component of renewable energy has come. Political support to the sector through 'Make in India' is unparalleled. With millions of job and access to high quality training programme to support the domestic solar and wind manufacturing market, the pace of renewable energy scale up in India should be very high, and it is not long before India becomes the world leader in energy sector.
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